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Sunday, 26 August 2018

It’s much easier to
read a book about something you already know something about; harder when you
are ignorant and so have to simultaneously read and store new information all the time.
Knowing nothing about Thrace (Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish) I thought I would find
this book hard, but most of the time it is very readable and at times moving. I
struggled a bit with the constantly changing cast of characters.

In the most general
terms it is a book about how people find it hard to get on with their
neighbours, and quite often are forced to reject them even against their wishes,
and how borders end up not just fortified with leylandii but barbed wire and
machine gun posts. It’s also a book about how easy it is to turn young men into
killers.

In this context a
wonderful chapter about a hopelessly ecumenical Greek orthodox priest (a cadre
not noted for ecumenism) is both beautifully written and deeply moving:

“ ‘Thrace without
borders. Just as it should be,’ Father Alexander said when I first visited them
at home, dropping in without notice. I hoped they didn’t mind, I said.

‘Mind?’ Alexander said
and bit into a cheese pastry. ‘We only like guests who drop in without notice’”
(page 154)

I can see how it
merited its shortlistings and prize. I was a bit surprised to find a number of
repetitions which are not stylistic but failed copy and pasting – something
which an editor should have picked up.

I had a partner once who
teased me whenever I informed her that I had worked something out in my own
head. She had a sharp ear for pleonasm and so I made attempts to avoid being
teased. Yesterday I discovered that the journal Radical Philosophy has been resurrected. The old one was started up in the
early 1970s and ran to two hundred issues before shutting up shop; the reincarnation
is on issue number two. This morning in the shower - and nearly fifty years
after contributing to the first issue of the original Radical Philosophy - I had
the thought (in my own head), Isn’t the expression radical philosophy a pleonasm?

All philosophy tries to
get to the root/s of things, to get beyond repetition of conventional wisdom, reliance on unchallenged assumptions, polite acquiescence in received
ideas. That does not entail that philosophical conclusions must end up being
sceptical in character. You may dig down to the roots and discover that they
are very strong and hold up the tree very well. Your task then becomes that of
re-familiarising others with that fact, of getting them to look afresh at what
has become so familiar as to become too much taken for granted. Take a look,
give that root a big kick and you will find that it hurts you more than it hurts
the root. (Apologies to Dr Johnson).

In any case, to confine
philosophy to just sceptical and non-sceptical versions is a very limiting way
of thinking. Raymond Geuss titles a recent book (the only one of his I have
read) Changing The Subject and
broadly speaking argues that philosophers repeatedly change the state of the
question. It’s a commonplace in the philosophy of science at least since Thomas
Kuhn’s work (1950s – 1960s) that when a scientific revolution occurs, it’s not
just a theory which changes. It is the questions asked, the bits of the world
which seem in need of study, the definition of the subject itself. Geuss is
casting the history of philosophy as having a similar dynamic. But in the
case of both science and philosophy, that does not exclude the claim that they aim at truth.

There is “philosophical”
art and literature which also tries to dig down to the roots, either to refresh
our understanding of our world or to persuade us that we would be better off if
we shifted ourselves into a different world. Wordsworth seeks to refresh; Shklovsky
and Brecht seek to shift, seek to tap into a sense that "something's missing".

On the internet the other
day I came across a Marxist writer describing me as a “one-time radical”. I
smiled and retorted in my own head, You’ve probably been banging the same drum for decades. I’m sure it’s very comforting. But
there’s a world out there which changes all the time and it’s quite important
that we dig in the new places, not just the old familiar ones. The old songs
are comforting but philosophy has never been a comfort zone.

Saturday, 4 August 2018

It's official. I'm an Author. This morning I googled my name (in scare quotes) and there on the right side of the page is a recent photograph of me, my name, and the word "Author" - all selected by Google without human intervention, as far as I am aware.

It remains only for the Author to tempt some people into reading his Books, which languish unsold everywhere from Amazon to Waterstones. Time to do your bit to support the Judgment of Google!

On my desktop there are
a dozen or more folders containing a few hundred Word docs which claim to be
essays, chapters, very short stories, vignettes, aphorisms, plus many more
beginnings of the same. I am convinced that since they all come from the same
brain, I ought to be able to arrange enough of them into something which could
Pass as a book. So far, I have yet to convince anyone else, and not really
myself either.

Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights
has given me fresh hope. Her publishers, in original Polish and in this English
translation, have allowed her over four
hundred pages of compilation – and they are very readable! Her bits and
pieces can be loosely arranged under such superordinate themes as “Travel” (which
is converted to the title Flights) and
“Anatomy” and surely if I scratch around a bit I can find a couple of
overarching themes for my stuff.

Most of us nowadays
read books (if at all) in fits and starts, and Tokarczuk’s book slots perfectly
into our habits. I have been reading a couple of sections – they all have
helpful bold titlesto break up the text
– and then turn, as one does, to check emails and the latest bits and pieces
which make up the day’s World News. It
has all felt quite seamless. This is the way to go, I tell myself. Now you have
a weapon to beat sceptical editors!

Tokarczuk has the cast
of mind of an obsessive and like many obsesssives, she has accumulated a
splendid cabinet of curious bits of knowledge: “The shortest war in history was
waged between Zanzibar and England in 1896, lasting thirty-eight minutes” (page
109). I loved that and immediately linked to the kind of Wittgensteinian puzzle
which undergraduates used to ponder and may still ponder (though “pondering”
does not really capture youthful minds): Can you be in love with someone for
thirty eight minutes? Does the concept of being in love apply only in relation to
something which is a bit more enduring than that?

You could say that
Tokarczuk’s book is “about death” because it contains a lot of dead bodies,
usually preserved in formaldehyde or subject to other techniques of
preservation (the author catalogues many with considerable panache). You could
say it is “about love and loss” because there are the beginnings of quite long
short stories spliced into the book which fit that category. You could say that
it is “about being a middle-aged woman” because there are wistful asides on the subject, scattered through the pages, just as
there are scattered remarks about Catholicism and Communism. You could say that
it is about human lives without a centre, the fact disguised by endless
displacements (flights).

Or you could just say that it makes an interesting and
unusual book to pick up and put down, on a train journey, on a flight. But the absence of a main plot line is probably disconcerting for the reader who likes to be drawn along for two or three hours without a break and wants to feel that they are travelling to some destination.